Re: Slab Fragmentation Reduction V15

From: Pekka Enberg
Date: Sat Jan 30 2010 - 03:54:48 EST


On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 10:49 PM, Christoph Lameter
<cl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This is one of these year long projects to address fundamental issues in the
> Linux VM. The problem is that sparse use of objects in slab caches can cause
> large amounts of memory to become unusable. The first ideas to address this
> were developed in 2005 by various people. Some of the issues with SLAB that
> we discovered while prototyping these ideas also contributed to the locking
> design in SLUB which is highly decentralized and allows stabilizing the object
> state slab wise by taking a per slab lock.
>
> This patchset was first proposed in the beginning of 2007. It was almost merged
> in 2008 when last minute objections arose in the way this interacts with
> filesystem objects (inode/dentry).

Yeah, I think the SLUB bits were fine but there wasn't clear whether
or not the FS bits would be merged. No point in merging functionality
in SLUB unless it's going to be used.
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